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BY REUBEN HEYMAN-KANTOR

In print | Published October 28, 2004

A group of Swarthmore students have united to press the American government and private citizens to do more to stop what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

Since the crisis, which Secretary of State Colin Powell has called a genocide, began in February 2003 more than 1.5 million Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes. During the past seven months, pro-government militias, known by the international community as the janjaweed, have killed 70,000 people, primarily civilians, according to The Associated Press.

Mark Hanis ’05 has been a leading member of the group of students concerned about the genocide.

“Over the summer I worked for a [non-governmental organization], and one of their projects was called Darfurgenocide.org, and so I was every day finding out more information about the genocide,” Hanis said. “When I came to Swarthmore, I tried to talk to other Swatties, finding out what more Swarthmore was going to do to respond to the genocide … Unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t know what was happening,” he said.

Hanis, members of Amnesty International and several other students are particularly interested in pressing the U.S. government to supply military aid for a peacekeeping mission of African Union troops. “The U.S. doesn’t have to send in troops, it’s never going to do that, but we can focus a lot of our actions on supporting the African Union troops by expanding their mandate and increasing their numbers,” Hanis said.

The Comprehensive Peace in Sudan Act was passed by the House of Representatives in September, but has not yet been voted on in the Senate. The bill would provide humanitarian and military aid for the region and require the Department of the Treasury to identify all companies doing business in Sudan and examine the relationship between the companies’ business activities and current human rights abuses. The bill would give the treasury department the power to remove companies that do business with Sudan from the New York Stock Exchange.

Amnesty International members and Hanis have begun a letter-writing campaign to urge senators to support the act.

Andrew Sniderman ’06, working with Hanis and others, has developed a project to raise money from private sources to supplement American public aid. “We are proposing the creation of a private fund-raising initiative, a genocide intervention fund to support a military intervention in Darfur and to create a financial base to fight genocides of the future,” Sniderman said.

“This fund would be a private initiative … so that the African Union could have the financial and logistical means to stop the genocide,” Hanis said.

The proposal has been sent to major newspapers, think tanks and various current and former government officials. The Center for American Progress has recently expressed interest in the initiative, as have two former members of president Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, Gayle Smith and John Prendergast, Sniderman said. Though Swarthmore students started the initiative, the fund-raising efforts will not be limited to the college community, Sniderman said.

Emiliano Rodriguez ’05 has also begun an effort to look at if and how the college as an institution might be able to pressure the Sudanese government by divesting from companies that do business in the country.

Most of the endowment is invested in domestic firms that do not work in Sudan. Part of the endowment, however, is invested in mutual funds that have international portfolios, Rodriguez said.

“Once we receive the list of companies doing business in Sudan, we will see if any of those are held by the investment managers who manage the international funds in which the endowment invests,” Vice President and Treasurer Suzanne Welsh said in an e-mail. If the college did decide to pressure its investment managers to divest from firms doing business in Sudan, a decision would have to be reached by the Board of Managers.

“Divestment shouldn’t be viewed as a moral stand, or some moral utterance,” Rodriguez said. “This regime relies almost exclusively on foreign investment to fund its operations,” he said.

Despite the progress made since the beginning of the school year, the Swarthmore response to the crisis are still at a formative stage.

“I’ve consulted with various students including Mark [Hanis] in particular, and I applaud their efforts,” political science professor Raymond Hopkins said.

“This is a very difficult undertaking because of … ‘the collective action problem.’ We don’t have a regular agency in the U.S. focused specifically on this type of action, and there are issues raised of American citizens attempting to make their own foreign policy,” Hopkins said.

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